I tell people, repeatedly, that publisher brand fuels a strange economic environment for scholarly communications. I also note that symbolic capital (reputation) has a direct conversion to material capital (money). Finally, I point out that the economics of books are harder than journals for new OA publishers for reasons of scale in both material and symbolic economics.

There is no single cause of the problems with the economics of scholarly communications. The expectation that we can publish more and more research on the same, or lesser, budgets is one factor. The rise of profiteering commercial publishers is another. There is also a group of smaller other aspects, though, one of which I will discuss here.

“It is never a good time to start a new journal. Even so, 1987 seems unpropitious to a remarkable degree. The academic world in general feels itself to be under attack. The Humanities in particular feel marginalized and underfunded. Outwardly querulous, inwardly riven, they sense themselves to be hopelessly at odds with a culture which has long abandoned any recognition of the value of their role.

The most common way in which we can re-conceive of the economics of gold open access is to think of the publisher as providing a service to the author. After all, in an academic environment (where open access is most likely to flourish) authors are not usually writing their books to receive huge financial returns; they are, instead, paid through their salaried position.

The current transition to gold open access (OA) through the implementation of an author- or institution-facing charge (an article or book processing charge: APC or BPC) is based upon two key flawed assumptions that are particularly acute in the humanities disciplines. The first of these assumptions is that a market will emerge in which rational actors (researchers) will develop price sensitivity in the selection of their publication venue.

I am reading a most remarkable book. I tend to read in sets of three: a novel, a work of lit crit/philosophy/history, then something about technology. This latter category includes library information science stuff, history of technology stuff and sometimes programming manuals. David West’s Object Thinking , published by Microsoft, is ostensibly in this last group but like nothing else.

A map, as of the 1st March 2015, of Chapter Four of the book I am slowly working on. This chapter primarily focuses on Percival Everett’s Erasure . Chapter Four: Academic Fiction First chapter on legitimation Everett's insider status Summary of Erasure Erasure as metafiction Subject position of author High Theory references Disparaging towards High Theory/postmodernist approach Resorts to

A map, as of the 28th February 2015, of Chapter Three of the book I am slowly working on. Chapter Three: Political Critique and the University in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 In Chapter 2, C was presented as aesthetic critique This chapter is on political critique Form/content dichotomy is false but there are still strengths of focus Summary of 2666 Text is metafictional Reference to utopia “great imperfect torrential

I wrote the following letter in this week’s Times Higher Education. I post it here for those who can’t get past the paywall. As debates rage on how to spend the £1.2 million surplus of The Sociological Review (“Journal board in dark over £1m surplus”, 19th February 2015), it is disappointing that there is no comment on how this surplus was possible or whether it is ethical.

A map, as of the 22nd February 2015, of Chapter Two of the book I am slowly working on. Mimetic representation academy not only possible interaction Intertextuality can be seen as academy-like function of (self-)canonisation Tom McCarthy's C University English haunts text Public persona of author as popular literary critic Synopsis of C Inter-textuality key to novel and its marketing Thomas Pynchon